2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: reelaviolette botts-ward
reelaviolette botts-ward is a homegirl, artist, and nontraditional community curator from Philadelphia, PA. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the REPAIR Project at UCSF, she researches Black women's healing spaces in Oakland as radical sites of health care and spiritual well-being. As founder of blackwomxnhealing, ree curates healing circles, exhibitions, courses, and research for and by Black womxn. She remains invested in making her academic work accessible to community audiences, using art, poetry, and the digital humanities as tools of translation. Her first book, mourning my inner[blackgirl]child (Nomadic Press, 2021), uses poetics as praxis to explore embodied trauma, ancestral grief work, and spiritual healing. Her work has been featured by Elle Magazine, The Griot, and the NAACP, and supported by the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, among others. She received her PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, her MA in African American Studies from UCLA, and her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. She is currently teaching The #BlackFeministHealingArts Communiversity Course in UCSF’s Medical Anthropology department.
2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Winner: Frankie Free Ramos
Frankie Free Ramos is from Yauco, Puerto Rico, spent much of her childhood in San Diego, and has lived in the Bay Area since moving to Berkeley for undergraduate studies in the 1990s. After obtaining a teaching credential and Masters in Teaching from the University of San Francisco, Dr. Ramos worked for over 10 years as a teacher and college counselor, and was a founding member of a radical small school in East Oakland. She earned a PhD from UC Berkeley in Education Leadership, Policy and Politics. Her scholarship and activism focus on teacher and community organizing, social movements, and decolonial and abolitionist praxis. She has been active in struggles for the self-determination of Puerto Rico, freedom for political prisoners and an end to privatization, neoliberalization, and austerity in education. She currently serves as the Director of Campaigns and Organizing at CURYJ (Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice), a community based organization in Oakland, CA, working to end youth incarceration and unlock the leadership of young people to dream beyond bars. Dr. Ramos is raising three children and a puppy with her partner. She enjoys spending time with them in nature, going on family trips, and laughing together.
2023 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize Honorable Mention: Giovanni Batz
Giovanni Batz (Maya K’iche’) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2020-2022, he was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. He was also a 2018-2019 Anne Ray Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas - Austin. Batz’s research and activism focuses on extractivist industries, Guatemalan history, Maya resistance, historical Maya displacement and transnational migration from Central America to the US. He has also served as an expert witness in asylum cases. Batz is the author of La Cuarta Invasión: Historias y Resistencias del Pueblo Ixil, y la Lucha contra la Hidroeléctrica Palo Viejo en Cotzal, Quiché, Guatemala (2022). The book is open access and can be downloaded here: https://avancso.org.gt/publicaciones/proximas-publicaciones/ His other publications can be accessed here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni-Batz-2